Writer's Workbench facts for kids

The Writer's Workbench (often called wwb) was an early computer program. It was like a grammar checker that helped people improve their writing. Lorinda Cherry and Nina Macdonald from Bell Labs created it. It was one of the first widely used grammar checkers on Unix computer systems.

How Writer's Workbench Helped Writers

The Writer's Workbench had many tools to help analyze text. It could look at different parts of speech, like nouns and verbs. It also checked how long words and sentences were. Then, it compared your writing to what was considered good writing.

The main goal of Writer's Workbench was to teach students how to edit their own work. It helped them see that writing involves making choices. Once they wrote something down, they might think it was perfect. But the program showed them ways to make it even better. It encouraged them to revise and improve their writing.

In the 1980s, students and teachers at Colorado State University really liked using wwb. Studies showed that the program's suggestions matched how teachers graded essays. This meant it was a helpful tool for learning.

Tools in the Package

By 1983, the Writer's Workbench had 29 different tools, also called utilities. By 1986, this number grew to about 35 to 40 tools. Each tool helped with a different part of writing or editing.

Here are a few examples of what some of these tools could do:

• diction helped find sentences that were too wordy. It suggested simpler ways to say things.
• double found words that were accidentally repeated, like "the the."
• gram looked for common grammar mistakes, such as misused articles (like "a" or "an") and split infinitives.
• punct checked for correct punctuation in documents.
• sexist identified words that might be considered unfair to certain genders. It suggested more neutral alternatives.
• spellwwb was a special spell checker. It could check many files at once.
• style analyzed the overall writing style of a document.
• wwb was a main command that ran several other tools at once. It gave a full report on a document and suggested improvements.

History and What Came Next

The Writer's Workbench was included with AT&T UNIX in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This helped it become very popular. However, it was not part of Version 7 Unix.

After wwb, other similar programs were created. One famous example was Grammatik, a commercial program for IBM PC computers. It was based on ideas from Writer's Workbench.

Today, the GNU operating system has free versions of many wwb tools. These include programs like spell, style, and diction. So, even though Writer's Workbench itself is old, its ideas live on in modern software.

See also

• LanguageTool
• Programmer's Workbench (PWB/UNIX)